Project Transformational Vocabulary

Knowledge management
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The words we attach to our experience become our experience. Words have a biochemical effect on the body. (Tony Robbins)

Tony specifically refers to changing your emotional state through the language you use to describe your experience. He calls this type of language, transformational vocabulary.

Language is a tool. Tony’s idea is but one application of it. Jason Silva shares a mind-blowing perspective:

The world is made of language.

The words you use to map reality affect your experience of reality. Words do not just describe; words are generative.

Language is a metaphysical tool. […] We create and perceive our world through language. We think reality into existence through linguistic construction in real-time.

I’m fascinated by the magical technology we call ‘language’. I see language and meaning as the ultimate playground. I’m especially interested in practical ways of using language for personal transformation and for shaping your subjective reality – I call this process, reality painting.

I see concepts as the (modular) building blocks of meaning. In playing with concepts, we’re playing with meaning in the same way a child is playing with Legos.

We all have an internal concept library we unconsciously use to construct meaning in real-time. The library was unconsciously (and haphazardly) ‘compiled’ over the course of our life. I want to make this process conscious and deliberate.

I’ve started compiling a dictionary of the most powerful concepts humanity has created that are transferrable across domains and disciplines. I call this project, Transformational Vocabulary – an extension of Tony’s idea.

I’m interested not just in the concepts, but also in the interconnections between them. I use Obsidian for this project because it allows me to see them as a graph – as a beautiful (and useful) constellation of meaning.

It looks like this so far (as a different vault from my primary one):

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I’m also deconstructing and organizing the concepts, identifying various kinds of structures: metaphoric, expressive, emotionally charged, modifiers, amplifiers, etc.

I’m open to collaboration with anyone interested.

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This looks amazing… Do you have it online somewhere that I can download this and see what I can offer?

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Hi. Sorry for the late reply. I’ve been thinking how to make this project collaborative.

One insight I had was that one’s transformational vocabulary is personal. Words have personal meaning. The personal meaning of a word is your internal model of it, which is a web of ideas and personal experiences.

For instance, two of the central concepts (and values) of my life are Love and Play. But by communicating the words, I haven’t communicated anything. To communicate a concept is to communicate your personal meaning of it. To communicate my personal meaning of Love and Play, I’d have to write a book.

I realized that the transformational vocabulary is mainly a personal tool – a playground and a visual representation of your universe of meaning. The benefit is in creating your own, so maybe this is something you could experiment with. We could also arrange a video chat if you’re interested, where I can tell you more about my vision and practical use of it.

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I am interested. I love the idea of language being generative - that’s a powerful observation. I keep lists of my values, guiding principles, and things like that. And I’ve come across a lot of new words in my recent reading that I want to keep track of so that I can understand them more deeply. I was thinking of putting them in obsidian with my values, but I wasn’t sure why.

I think your architecture of transformative words might be a great encapsulation of where I was headed. And I’m especially interested in your structures and modifiers and how you decide to connect words together and what happens – for you – when you navigate your structure.

I’d be interested in talking.